#it frees up an extra guy to make a lighting engine for splatoon 4 or whatever

[anarchopuppy]

"Why did Tears of the Kingdom have a development cycle just as long as Breath of the Wild's even though it reused so many assets?" is a question that I think fundamentally misunderstands how modern game design works

It assumes that the team does something like all sit down, develop the physics engine, then they can move on to the overworld map, then they can move on to making the cutscenes, etc. and when you think about that for just a second it becomes obviously absurd. Developing a physics engine, writing dialogue, creating textures, designing puzzles, and so on are all different disciplines that different specialists work on in parallel and in cooperation

What probably actually happened is a lot of the artists, engine devs, and so on put a lot less time into the project, before/while working on a bunch of different projects at Nintendo (quite possibly including the engine and art for the next Zelda game), and they also probably didn't need to get Monolith Soft to help design the overworld. Meanwhile, the puzzle designers, writers, and a lot of the rest of the team have to do just as much work as they did for Breath of the Wild (or more!), and so it's not that surprising that it took just as long

(Disclaimer that I don't know for certain that this is how it happened internally at Nintendo, and short of interviewing the devs I don't think there's any way to find out. The credits won't help because close to all of the people who moved on to other teams either worked on TotK for part of the development and/or had their work ported over from BotW. This is just my understanding of how modern AAA game development works)